


Dreaming the Lonely Night Through

by verger_de_pommiers



Series: One Summer in Brooklyn [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes is handsome, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, M/M, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Sickness, boys being dumb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-24
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-03-14 14:39:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18950149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verger_de_pommiers/pseuds/verger_de_pommiers
Summary: ‘I ain’t gonna be anything. I’m gonna be in this same spot. Nothin’ nothin’ at all.’





	Dreaming the Lonely Night Through

He had been trying to read for an hour or so – one of Bucky’s books, _The Hobbit_. Bucky had only had it a week but it was already scuffed at the edges, corners turned over and, most bizarrely, as if there was anything Bucky did that wasn’t bizarre, there were little notes in pencil under particular lines and in the margins. Steve had managed to focus himself on one: ‘At _may never return_ he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel,’ and in Bucky’s slanted writing, _you should see a doctor about that, old Billy_. Steve’s eyebrows knit together but then, as before, his mind drifted. From his bed he could hear the noise of the city and could see the dark blue sky overcome by stars and steam. Bucky, jacket in hand, had left the window slightly ajar. Bucky had become very good at “reading the signs,” as he called it, of when Steve was becoming ill. He did not know, however, that Steve had become good at hiding them, and, even now, shivering under the duvet and wishing that he had a long stick that he may use to draw the curtains, too weak to move, Steve revelled in this and smiled a mischievous goblin smile, cheeks burning fever red and eyes dazed and glassy. So Bucky had gone dancing. Steve tried not to let the push of the silence and stillness of his room against the hectic susurrus outside creep into him, make him feel desperate and sad. He opened up the book again. Bucky loved to read. He loved to read as much as Steve hated to dance. His books littered every surface, scattered underneath his bed, piled up next to their shoes. And it was always fantastical: creatures from space and magical machines. Sometimes Steve would draw little scenes from them, just for Bucky.

He sighed, gathering the blanket under his chin and slumping down, book sliding out of his hand, and glanced at his stack of sketchbooks on the floor. He was too sick to draw now, he was too sick to do anything. The best he could do was to scoot himself down to the end of the bed and reach up to the switch to turn the light off and save both him and Bucky money on electricity. Electricity he had been wasting sitting there, not doing anything at all. His eyes began to sting. He hated to cry. It was only when he was sick that he cried, but he still tried his best not to, to hide it if anyone was with him. But it had already started: the voices. They were in the walls, whispering all the things he hated about himself, sinking and sinking, getting louder, closer. He could see the letters bobbing up and down and bulging into shapes that grew and grew. He hated hating himself, and was very good at not hating himself, but only when he was well. He turned over so that he was facing the wall and scrunched up his eyebrows so that he could be angry rather than sad, and covered his mouth with a fist. That was when the front door opened. He closed his eyes tight, but couldn’t help letting out a sob.

‘Steve it was so borin’ I tell ya. Ya weren’t missin- hey. What-’ a hand was on his shoulder, tugging him onto his back, ‘aw Hell Steve!’

‘No no!’ Steve shouted as Bucky pressed a palm to Steve’s forehead. He slapped Bucky’s hand away and turned back to face the wall.

‘Why d’ya goddam gotta…ugh you! I’m gonna go down the hall and run you a bath okay?’

But Steve had turned around and was tugging him by the front of his shirt.

‘Don’t you dare,’ he said, wrinkling his nose as the tears fell all over his cheeks. Then he let go and covered his eyes, and drew up his knees, wrapping himself up tightly so that all he saw was the redness behind his eyelids.

Bucky stood up straight and folded his arms. 

He turned and closed the curtains and stood there for a moment, biting on his lip. 

‘How’d you feel exactly. I don’t wanna risk-’

‘No no it’s just a cold, my head it’s…spinnin’ but. But I just. I just need to sleep.’

Then Bucky made a decision. If it got worse during the night then he would take Steve to the hospital. Nodding to himself he shuffled over to the bed and looked down at Steve’s face. His cheeks were a dusty red and his eyes were glazed slightly, but he was talking, following conversation. He’d gotten good at seeing the signs, the various ways Steve could be ill. Steve’s illnesses were volatile, vicious certainly but often taking hold suddenly and briefly. Bucky assured himself that this was so and not that Steve was somehow able to hide the signs until they were at there worse. Of course sometimes they lasted weeks and left Steve bored and bedridden, but Bucky knew that this wasn’t one of those. Knowing that made Bucky burn with pride. He felt like he carried a key to Steve, knew him through and through. He was special.

He turned the light off and instead of crawling into his own bed he nudged Steve against the wall and wrapped them both up, resting his fingers on top of Steve’s forehead one last time.

‘M’scared Buck.’

‘Huh?’

‘I said I’m scared,’ Steve was shivering. The fever must have already broken.

‘That’s new, how can you tell?’ he chuckled. ‘What’re you scared for?’

‘Not doing anything. Look at…out,’ he pointed to the window. ‘I wanna do something but,’ his words began to slur and Bucky could feel feverish heat radiating off of him. ‘But I’ll spend my life in this bed huh?’ Bucky suspected he was crying.

Steve was the sort of crier Bucky wanted to be. Steve would cry hot tears, face unchanged, stormy but silent. Bucky would cry loudly, desperate to be heard, face completely red and eyes screwed up tightly. 

‘I ain’t gonna be anything. I’m gonna be in this same spot. Nothin’ nothin’ at all.’

Bucky watched Steve in the dark. Steve was staring back at him with wide eyes that were spilling over into a gossamer shroud of tears, cloaking his cheeks in small twinkling lights. Bucky stared back, not breathing. As sudden as thunder the knowledge that Steve would, in fact, be something came upon him and he knew with absolute certainty that he, Bucky, would be left behind. So he said nothing.

Steve’s eyelids flickered closed and his flushed pink skin seemed grey without the light from his feverish eyes. Bucky closed his eyes too, feeling ill, and, plagued by dreams of Steve forgetting Bucky’s face, slept fitfully.

 

After greeting him Mr Kirby had asked if he was any good at drawing apples. Though he’d never tried, because there were rarely apples in the house, he had said ‘I sure am Mr Kirby.’ Mr Kirby then told him that his sister Abaigeal, a long nosed heavy browed woman, was visiting and together they were putting on an apple fair down Montague Lane. So Mr Kirby had commissioned him five posters of “cheerful looking apples” and, when his shift at the store had finished for the day, Steve had taken the stairs to his apartment two at a time to make a start. By six o’clock he had bitten two shallow cuts into his chin with his teeth and, thoroughly frustrated, made a sweeping motion with his arm, knocking the wasted paper to the floor. His pencil rolled under the table and hid behind a chair-leg. It was too hard, not having an apple in front of him. He could see the apple in his mind, speckled with light pinks and rusty yellows, but on paper it came out flat, superficial. He sighed. Sometimes he could do it – draw things from his dreams, or Bucky’s books, or memories of people on the subway – but they never looked like the original. Sometimes they looked better. He didn’t like it. Huffing at himself he bent over and slapped the paper back onto the table, then reached blindly for the pencil. The front door was suddenly open and slamming hard into the kitchen counter. Startled, Steve looked up and then swallowed thickly, standing, before Bucky, frantic and red faced, pushed him against the wall.

Bucky had been at the Rabinovitzes grocery store on Charlotte Street. He stood by the window enjoying the sun and letting his eyes glide over the apples, wondering why they arranged them into triangles. The smell of meat pervaded the air and haphazardly stacked products lay about his feet; books with broken spines, bruised fruit and wrapped up burnt bread the Rabinovitzes kept to give out to the homeless after work hours, and assortments of crockery, cotton dolls, used signs, some of which he could tell had been painted by Steve. As he was reaching for a third apple he broke out into a cold sweat and a horrid shock, like the thud of a piano key, shook him. _He had said nothing_. Something rotten in the pit of his stomach had grown and taken over. _M’scared Buck_. He had said nothing to save himself. His face suddenly felt scratchy, thinking about Steve’s little back bent over the table as he drew, or was he in bed? Sick again? With nobody there to tell him all the things he needed to hear. How could he have said nothing? He dropped the apples. They rolled over his feet and scattered.

‘Wassa madda?’ He looked down, hands in his hair. A toddler was standing barefoot beside him. They stared at each other before she was whirled up into her mother’s arms, crisp white dress flapping like a sheet on a washing line. The image of Steve all alone was making Bucky feel like he was going to die right there, in the Rabinovitzes grocery store. He was going to explode and ruin the clean tiled floor. 

He skidded to the door, foot gliding into one of his apples. It bounced off the counter and rolled out of the door and down the steps, reaching the pavement before Bucky. He was out of breath by the time he reached their building. He took the stairs two at a time.

‘What’s…what’s gotten. What’s gotten into you?’ Steve was saying. He wouldn’t look Bucky in the eyes so Bucky hiked him up higher against the wall, tightening his arms around Steve’s waist. He waited for Steve to shout at him for picking him up, but it never came.

‘I just…just needed to…to tell you,’ he swallowed. ‘I just needed to tell you that I think that you’re amazing.’

It was silent for a moment before Steve shouted ‘What!’ so loudly that Bucky dropped him.

‘What the heck are you talkin’ about!?’

‘Aw don’t give me that. Just listen to me. Okay. Just-’

‘Stop.’

‘Steve-’

‘I don’t wanna hear it.’

‘Well you’re gonna!’ 

The light was changing and the yellow wallpaper looked pink, the blues of the paper birds Steve had stuck to the walls glowing brightly. Steve had closed his mouth. Slowly Bucky raised his hands and pressed them gently against Steve’s shoulders.

‘Okay,’ Bucky huffed, ‘the other night, when you were sick. You said you weren’t going to be anything,’ he slowed down, trying to pronounce all the letters so that Steve would hear them, ‘That you’d be in this same spot and…I didn’t say anything because I was scared because I know the truth and I don’t want to be without you,’ he licked his lips, completely shocked at himself. ‘So I kept my mouth shut. But I need you to know that all that stuff you said. It’s not true. You are gonna be something, I’ve known it since I met you. I-’ he closed his eyes and swallowed nervously before opening them again, ‘I’m so-’ But he did not know what he was trying to say. They stared at each other. He wanted badly to look away but could not. Steve’s cheeks were a dusty red, shiny as apples.

‘Oh shit,’ Bucky said, ‘the apples. They’re on the floor.’

Steve sighed, rolling his eyes, and looked away.

‘Oh no Steve,’ Bucky said, hands slipping off Steve’s shoulders as Steve shoved him away and sat by the table, fiddling with his sketches. ‘I meant it all, I did. I was gonna buy apples though, I really felt like apples but I ran out to tell you-’

‘Yeah yeah your speech was nothin’ to write home about. Go get me some apples, I need to do these posters.’

The front door closed and Steve reached for his pencil, but his hand was shaking and the pencil bounced out of his fingers and onto the floor.

 

When Steve had finished with them Bucky chopped up the apples and dished them out equally. Steve had sat rigidly in his chair as he cleaned up the lines of his poster and started sketching out a plan for the second. He thought this one might have a portrait of a smiling Abaigeal, basket of shining apples in hand. All the while he kept glancing distractedly at Bucky. He was completely bewildered. Bucky was secretive, subtle, not always honest. His behaviour today was somewhat disconcerting. He watched Bucky carefully, eyebrows furrowed.

‘You’re gonna shake stuff up, I can tell, that was another thing I wanted to say’ Bucky said, scribbling something on the book he had been using as a fan. Steve’s eyebrows hiked up of their own accord. He pulled them down again and scowled.

‘So are you,’ he said, viciously.

‘Oh yeah how’s that?’ Bucky said, chuckling. Steve made a desperate sound in the back of his throat then popped a slice of apple into his mouth, chewing loudly.

‘Those girls you dance with always look pretty shook up after. Maybe you step on their toes though, I can’t be sure.’

‘You know full well it’s my handsome looks that shake em.’

‘I know nothing like it.’

Steve felt somehow that he had just lost an argument. Bucky’s smirk confirmed it.

Steve frowned, then said: ‘actually yeah, you’re right. You’re really handsome.’

He watched Bucky fumble with his book, catching it before it hit the floor, then met his eyes steadily.

‘Um…Um well that’s…,’ Bucky said

‘What?’

Bucky’s eyes narrowed.

‘Steve.’

‘Yeah?’

‘This isn’t-’

‘What?’

They stared at each other, then Bucky glanced at the window. Although it was evening the sweltering summer heat was keeping the sky a bright blue. Bucky had rolled his trousers up, bare feet resting against the table leg, his forehead covered in a sheen of sweat.

‘What you want for dinner?’ Bucky said after a moment. Unsatisfied, Steve sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

‘What?’ Bucky said after a moment. Then he threw his book at Steve’s head, narrowly missing him. The book lay flat against the wall then slid down, slapping the floor. Steve had not had time to duck and, too angry to speak, he stood up and marched over to Bucky who stood up and stepped backwards, frustration gone.

‘What the hell was that for huh?’

‘Ah,’ Bucky huffed, waving his arms in the air, then walked into their bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Steve stood staring at the closed door. His skin sprang up in goose-bumps, all along the backs of his legs and up his arms. Unbidden the thought of his mother sitting by the table, waiting for him to talk, tell her all about it, reassure him, appeared behind his eyes.

‘You’re being bizarre again!’ Steve yelled through the door.

‘You were bizarre before you were born!’

 

Bucky was still in their bedroom and Steve, stubborn, did not want to go in there despite the desperate need to sleep. He sat at the table, sketching out designs, and blowing on his fringe. It was getting in his eyes. He looked around for something to tie it back with. His eyes fixed on Bucky’s tie and after a moment of frowning he got up and wrapped the tie around his head, fringe tucked underneath it, and knotted it at the back. Then he sat down and continued with his posters.

He couldn’t get Abaigeal’s smile right; it was stuck somewhere between manic and pleading. He rested his chin in one hand. Then the bedroom door creaked open and he quickly dropped his hand and schooled his face into a look of fierce concentration. 

‘Steve. Um…listen I-,’ Bucky said quietly, then snorted. ‘What. What the heck’s goin’ on there,’ he giggled.

‘Huh?’ Steve lowered his eyebrows. Bucky pointed. ‘Oh,’ Steve couldn’t help the giggles that escaped him. ‘I…yeah.’

‘What’s next Greta Garbo? You better tell Becca if that’s how they’re wearin’ it now.’

‘Don’t be daft. This is too manly for her,’ he grinned, tugging on his braces.

The smile caught in Bucky’s heart. He wanted to say sorry, for throwing the book, for being bizarre. He did not know where all this guilt was coming from all of a sudden. Thinking back, for a while now, there had been this current underneath his skin, like he had forgotten something. He could not concentrate anymore. Thoughts of Steve made him breathless with guilt. He wanted to do something. Something drastic. He did not know what.

‘I’m ravenous,’ he said instead. Steve gestured towards the stove.

‘Warm the soup, there’s enough for two.’

‘What are you gonna have then?’ he grinned, walking passed the table with a practiced swagger.

‘You’re so funny, you could be in the movies,’ Steve muttered flatly.

He decided resolutely, staring into the softly swirling soup, that he would not attempt to compliment Steve again. Steve did not take it well and, admittedly, it was an unusual enough occurrence to make it slightly uncomfortable. But Bucky did not know, now that he had done it, if he could stop himself. As soon as the words were out he had felt a swell of relief, like a weight had been taken off of his shoulders, and something else, something that had felt deliciously like adrenaline had coursed through him. 

And the trouble was that there were so many things about Steve that one might compliment. In fact, Bucky thought it might do Steve some good. Perhaps he would not feel the need to break his knuckles in alleyways so much, or chase after foul mouths, or get in the middle of fights he could never win. Bucky rolled his eyes at himself. That would never happen; Steve loved to do all those things. It was decided then; he would not pay Steve another compliment. Unless it was about his artwork, of course. Or if he had made a nice dinner. In fact, if either one of them made a “nice” dinner that would be a miracle and compliments would most definitely be due. 

However, if he ever caught himself acting on certain thoughts, like he had before, like knowing that Steve would make something of himself and knowing that Bucky would most likely be left behind, and then saying nothing to save his own feelings, well if he ever caught himself behaving in that way again he would stop immediately and hurl a barrage of compliments at Steve. He really felt that he wanted to write that down, to make it binding and true, and so that he would never forget it. Instead he handed Steve a bowl of soup, sat down beside him to inspect his drawings, and told him that they were the best damn apple fair poster sketches he had ever seen.

**Author's Note:**

> Bucky missed The Lord of the Rings by about 10 years. (I doubt Hydra had much of a library...) I think he would have loved Strider, and Eowyn may have reminded him of someone....


End file.
